Here in America we worry about democrats trying to take away our 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms. Over in England, Royal subjects are not allowed to have guns so Brits run around stabbing each other, which prompted the government to take away knife ownership rights. Naturally British thugs have to move on to carrying something else lethal.

Or, as we put it:

That’s a badass-lookin’ Bowie, by the way, although I prefer my Fox (with 1911 to give the proper proportion of the thing):

One wonders what the Regents Park Plod would make of that? (Oh, and I have no rusty spoons in my possession, so I’d be okay — see link for explanation.)

Which led me to a tangential question: what if the 17 million who voted for Brexit were all angry, racist, 50+ year-old men?

In the broader sense of the thing, what happens when an “undesirable” group of people become the majority of the voting population?

Actually, we all know what happens, because we’ve seen it since late 2016. What happens is that the once-entrenched “elites” — especially if said elites are on the Left side of the political spectrum — will try to overturn the election results.

In Europe (and more recently in post-Brexit U.K.) the Left resorts to re-running the elections until they get the result they wanted in the first place. Hence the endless delays and negotiations involved in the Brexit debate, with all the obfuscations about “tax union”, “backstop” and all the other smokescreen terms used essentially to slow and eventually stop the process.

In the United States, the Left over the years has resorted to all sorts of underhand and illegal methods to get their desired result, such as trying to overturn the winner’s election through multiple recounts (Bush/Gore 2000 et al.), trying to get states’ electors to vote against the wishes of their voters (Trump/Clinton 2016), trying to undermine the winner’s election by asserting foreign collusion (Trump/Clinton 2016 again), or trying to pad the electoral rolls with illegal voters (every election in living memory).

All the above are a consequence of a group of people labeled by the Left as “undesirables” (clingers, flyover country voters, deplorables, angry old White men etc.) growing in number until they achieve an electoral majority.

What’s interesting in Britain is the emergence of a single-issue political party (the Brexit Party) which is draining voters away from both the Conservative and Labour parties and which will basically serve to enforce once and for all the desire of a majority of British voters to leave the European Union. I am reliably informed that even a large number of people who originally voted to remain in the EU have become disgusted with the EU’s arrogance and bullying of Britain’s hapless PM Theresa May, and will change their vote in favor of Brexit if the Remainers manage to arrange another referendum on the topic.

That hasn’t happened Over Here. There has been no hint of a third (TRUMP!) party to force the political establishment to follow the MAGA principles and policies. Instead, the Socialist Democrats of the Left have wrenched the once-dominant Democrat party into the loony extreme-Left sliver of the political spectrum, and their lunacy has managed to drive not only moderate Democrats but also a large number of one-time Never-Trumpers (excepting some egregious hardliners) to coalesce into support behind the President and his policies — aided greatly, it should be said, by the massive surge of economic growth and the concomitant reduction of unemployment since Trump’s inauguration. When one-time Leftist hardliners like Nancy Pelosi are now seen as the “voice of reason” in Congress, you have to realize that despite all the Left’s insult and invective, the country seems to have resolved itself not into three camps like the U.K., but into a near-supermajority of moderates and conservatives drawn from all socio-economic classes on one side, and a segment of extremist Marxists in a small (and still-shrinking) minority out on the other. (This, by the way, is why the Democrat party — what’s left of it — is grasping so firmly at the amiable but forever unelectable Joe Biden as their “centrist” white knight, despite his eternal and unshakable catastrophic awfulness as a presidential candidate.)

None of this bodes well for the Left, by the way, especially as Trump — as he promised back in 2015/2016 — is populating the courts with Constitutionally-sound judges, a policy which will deny the Left their favorite method of undermining the popular will and even laws by a sympathetic judiciary. (Had Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts not somehow transformed himself into an Anthony Kennedy “moderate”, the effect would have been greater still.) When even the loony and oft-overturned Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is driven to support the President’s policies on topics such as immigration, you know the writing is on the wall.

Of course, none of this is written in concrete. British voters may decide to split their votes between Brexit and Labour — thus dooming the Conservative Party to irrelevance (a fate, it should be said, that is richly deserved) — which may even bring that foul and unrepentant Communist Jeremy Corbyn to power at the head of a Labour government. (The wealthier Brits can see that possibility all too clearly, by the way, and are making the necessary SHTF preparations. Always follow the money.)

On this side of The Pond, things are equally uncertain. Moderate (traditional) Democrats may refuse to vote rather than vote for Trump in 2020, and the traditional Black- and Hispanic voter blocs may yet vote for the “interest-group” party (Democrat) instead of voting for the man whose economic policies have allowed them to climb out of poverty in greater numbers than ever before. (I know, it makes no sense to me either, but such is life.) And just as most Brits are quailing at the thought of Prime Minister Corbyn, most Americans should be afraid of a President [deep breath] Biden / Harris / Booker / Buttigieg / Warren / [add your favorite Dwarf’s name here]. We should also, as a nation, be afraid of the reelection of House Reps Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib and Omar — to name but the three most egregious socialists — but with metro New York, urban Michigan and suburban Minneapolis / St. Paul, there’s no telling.

In Britain, there used to be a political party known as the Raving Loony Party (headed by the wonderful Screaming Lord Sutch) and in Canada there likewise used to be the Rhino Party (whose party manifesto stated that if elected to power, they would immediately resign and call for new elections). Both parties gave voters a chance to vote for “none of the above” by virtue of their absurdity. How interesting that the modern-day Democrats are trying to create such a party in the United States — but unlike the Raving Loonies and Rhinos, they are actually deadly serious about putting their own policies into practice.

Over at samizdata.net, Andrew Douglas had this to say in Comments about the post referendum polity in the U.K.:

The only things we certainly know more about since the referendum are that neither the Conservative or Labour parties are to be trusted, the top echelons of the civil service are staffed by quislings and traitors, and the EU is an even less desirable place to remain than it was in 2016.

Substitute “Election 2016” for referendum, Republicans and Democrats for their respective British counterparts, leave the “civil service” part alone, and you have pretty much my opinion of our own polity.

Had They Bet On Nuclear, Not Renewables, Germany & California Would Already Have 100% Clean Power

This is what we non-journalists call “complete bullshit”. In the first place, neither Germany or California “bet” on anything. Germany closed all their nukes in a panicked reaction to the Fukishima disaster in Japan, and California deliberately closed their existing nukes and prevented new ones from being built because Californians are a bunch of fucking Green morons (as, by the way, are the Krauts). There was no “gamble”, because everybody already knew that Green “technology” would be totally incapable of completely filling anybody’s power needs except maybe for the average sub-Saharan African country north of the Limpopo River. For Germany and California? Not even close. And when even Al Gore is calling California foolish…

That said, I’m not taking a potshot at the author of the above piece, because authors seldom write their own headlines — this would probably be the doing of some Forbes editor, who’s either stupid or purposely slanted. In fact, given that Michael Schellenberger is TIME Magazine’s “Hero of the Environment,” a Green Book Award Winner, and President of Environmental Progress, the article is remarkably clear-headed and factual — which was clearly A Bridge Too Far for Forbes magazine, which used to be a go-to business publication but has recently become completely irrelevant — and the above should tell you why.

Global Meat-Eating Is On the Rise, Bringing Surprising BenefitsSub-Saharan Africans currently have tiny carbon footprints because they use so little energy — excluding South Africa, the entire continent produces about as much electricity as France. The armies of cattle, goats and sheep will raise Africans’ collective contribution to global climate change, though not to near Western or Chinese levels. People will probably become healthier, though. Many African children are stunted (notably small for their age) partly because they do not get enough micro-nutrients such as Vitamin A. Iron deficiency is startlingly common. In Senegal a health survey in 2017 found that 42% of young children and 14% of women are moderately or severely anaemic. Poor nutrition stunts brains as well as bodies. Animal products are excellent sources of essential vitamins and minerals. Studies in several developing countries have shown that giving milk to schoolchildren makes them taller. Recent research in rural western Kenya found that children who regularly ate eggs grew 5% faster than children who did not; cow’s milk had a smaller effect.

In the reign of Emperor Kim, all those of the vegan persuasion will be exiled to sub-Saharan Africa, so they can never again be tempted into betraying their religion.

Seems like the Frogs have something called “social envy”, as discussed here.

A leader of the Yellow Vest movement, Ingrid Levavasseur, criticised “the inertia of big corporations over social misery while they are showing themselves capable of mobilising a crazy amount of cash overnight for Notre Dame”.
Philippe Martinez, head of France’s largest trade union, CGT, said: “Now understand that there are billionaires who have huge amounts of money and in one click put 200m, 100m on the table. It shows the inequalities in this country, which we regularly demonstrate against.”
Such criticism has been widespread. On French breakfast television last week, a guest insulted the Notre Dame donors as “rich bastards”, and even the moderate newspaper Le Monde wrote that “too much is too much”.

Even Le Monde? The irony is strong with this one, as that rag is typically to the left of Hillary Clinton.

No, what surprised me was this little snippet:

The international Ipsos Mori survey, in which dozens of questions were submitted to respondents, showed that the French have a particularly critical attitude towards rich people. Based on its findings, a Social Envy Coefficient was calculated, making it possible to measure how strong social envy against rich people is in a country.
According to this coefficient, social envy is highest in France with a score of 1.26, followed by Germany with 0.97. It is significantly lower in the US (0.42) and the UK (0.37).

I don’t know where they conducted the U.S. part of the survey — I’m suspecting the East- and West Coast major cities — but I am amazed to learn (by this survey’s metrics) that we Murkins are more socially envious than the Brits. We aren’t. There is no expression over here that is in any way similar to the withering “fucking toffs”, for example, and our initial impression on seeing someone driving a Ferrari is “I want one of those”, and not “I want his“.

We may hate our self-professed social elites, but we sure as hell don’t envy them, or their wealth. Our loathing is directed more at their paternalistic bossiness.

But that’s not to say that we are aren’t occasionally tempted to borrow an old custom from the Frogs and apply it to scum like, say, the entire Humanities Department at Harvard or the editorial committee of The New York Times...